Category Archives: Religion

I don’t talk about religion very much on this blog anymore. I tend to save religious discussions for my Christian Heresy blog. I do however often discuss politics here. Since this post is about both religion and politics in the United States, I thought it was better suited for this blog.

Yesterday was the Fourth of July – our Independence Day. Last night I watched the movie version of the Broadway musical 1776 on Turner Classic Movies. The movie was actually better than I expected, mainly because it was less of a musical than I thought it would be. I found the dramatization of some of the debates in the Continental Congress rather interesting. I don’t know how historically accurate those dramatizations were. At one point in the movie, our Founding Fathers were recommending the various and sundry changes to the original wording of the Declaration of Independence. One of the delegates from the South asked for the inclusion of the phrase containing Divine Providence. He felt that the colonies would have no chance winning a war against Great Britain without divine help and that our declaration should acknowledge that. That’s certainly makes sense given the times and the culture of the colonies in 1776.

The Doors of Perception is the title of a book about taking hallucinogenic drugs, especially LSD. It was written by Aldous Huxley almost 100 years ago, now. Jim Morrison, the late lead singer of The Doors read this book. It inspired the name he chose for his group. Timothy Leary read this book and became a prophet of LSD. I read the book back about 1966 or 1967. It took me until fall of 1968 to screw up the courage to try LSD. That first trip is an experience I will never forget, along with a few other memorable “trips.” “Trips” are what we called the experience of taking LSD.

The first trip was on a nice warm day in October, I think, as I was hanging around with some friends on the streets of Old Town in Chicago – the hippie district. The reason the trip was so memorable was that was when I called my father back in Furlong, Pennsylvania, to tell him that I was in Chicago and I was not coming back. A very interesting conversation, indeed.

About two years later, I was working at an auto parts store on the South Side of Chicago. I had recently moved in with the woman who became my second wife. We shared a large apartment on the North Side of Chicago, a couple blocks from an elevated train station. The reason that is important to this story is that I used public transportation, a bus and the elevated, to get back and forth to work. I had been there at the auto parts store for several months and had made friends with several of the guys who work there. One afternoon, when we were outside on a smoke break, one of the guys I knew handed me a little orange barrel shaped pill. I knew exactly what it was – a very, very good form of LSD called “orange sunshine.” It was recognized as one of the purest forms of acid available on the street. My friend said I should take this as I was leaving work and I would be tripping quite nicely by the time I got home an hour later.

My son Michael is a very serious gamer. The reason he is a serious gamer is because I got him hooked on gaming back when he was six years old. I started Michael out on Warcraft II and there’s been no stopping him since. Michael loves to play games, design games, review games, read reviews, and read/watch all kinds of blogs and video blogs about gaming.

Recently Michael showed me a post on a video blog called Game Theory. It seems that the blogger who does Game Theory recently got to do an interview with Pope Francis. The man brought the Pope a video game. I’ll let him explain what video game and why he wanted the Pope to have this game in this very thoughtful video he made on the occasion. What I want to talk about is the social context and social philosophy that this man, who claims to represent the gaming community, presents to all gamers and non-gamers. His name is Matt, by the way, and I will refer to him as such. Continue reading A Little Sunshine and a Lot of Hope→

My Christian Heresy site was hacked on Wednesday by what appears to be a group of religious fundamentalists. What particular religion they are fundamental about is really not important. I dislike all fundamentalists, religious or secular. For some reason that I do not understand since I do not criticize anyone’s religious beliefs or single out any religion or targeting, these people were offended by something I said on my site. Well, tough shit! [Sorry about the language but they’re going to be more, so get used to it.]

Because of the hack being a whole lot worse than originally thought, I am going to have to completely redo my site, switching scripts that I use from Drupal to WordPress. That means the database is not going to transfer. For me, that means I am going to have to re-enter each article one at a time. That obviously will take a bit of time so be patient with me. Michael and I will get it done as quickly as we can. As for you all, it means you’re going to have to set up a new membership the new login on the work press their version of my site. Also, write permissions will be very limited for obvious reasons. We may have to play around a bit until we figure out what we can and cannot allow. Again, bear with me. We will get this set up as quickly as we can Continue reading An Update On christianeresy.com→

Today is my 68th birthday! Yes, happy birthday to me. Thank you! In honor of my birthday I have decided to go back to the Confronting The Past series. This is a rather momentous year for me. First of all, I turned 68. Second, it has been 50 years since I graduated from high school [by the way, happy anniversary to all the members of the class of 1966 at UM HS.] Third, my wife and I will celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary in a couple of months. Fourth and last, by the end of the year all my children will be 20 years old or older. In my book that makes them adults. So, assuming I live to the end of the year, I will have lived long enough to see my children grow up. Not too shabby!

One of the advantages of age is that you are supposedly wiser than you were when you were young. Whether that is true in my case or anyone else’s is open for debate; when I’m going to assume that I have gained some wisdom in the last 50 years. One of the responsibilities of wisdom is that you impart that wisdom to others. After all, what good is anything if you don’t share it with those you care about? So here goes.

Those of you who know me very well, and there are a few of you, know that I have a very low opinion of the medical/health care professions. This low opinion is the result of many years of having to deal with their stupidity and ineptitude. I know at least one of you is going to be very insulted by this. All I can say is oh well! So what’s the latest reason for me to hate doctors?

10 years ago I had cataract surgery on both eyes. I went from being severely nearsighted to being severely farsighted. I have also had an astigmatism for a very long time. My last pair of glasses before I had my cataract surgery corrected for the astigmatism and also for the double vision I suffer from.

After the surgery, I had a pair of bifocals made up that were basically clear glass on the top and fairly powerful reading glasses on the bottom. Problem is, those glasses did not correct for the astigmatism or the double vision. I mentioned this to my ophthalmologist, who told me there was nothing they could do for me, that there was no way to correct for these problems. I suffered under this misinformation for the last 10 years. Because of this misinformation, I have not been able to read a book or a website, type on my own, or even read the program guide on my satellite TV channels.It turns out that there ARE corrective lenses for my problems. In fact, the glasses I had before my surgery corrected for both, as I mentioned. No wonder I’m pissed!

This bull manure is just the latest in a long series of episodes of stupidity, ignorance, or what ever you wish to call it by doctors who are so full of themselves and think they are infallible when in fact all they are is arrogant and conceited. Given the kind of money these people expect to get paid for their services, you would think they would make a better effort to be more attentive to the needs of their patients and not worry so much about their schedules or their wallets. Lord knows, most of them have very stuffed wallets. After all, being a doctor is very “lucrative.” That is the term that a doctor I happen to know used to explain why he took a position from which he recently retired.

By the way, although I tend to hate doctors, I absolutely love nurses, male or female. I owe the nurses in the emergency room and the ICU at the local hospital my life, at this point.

“In fact, the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required. In the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict meaning of the term. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature, in order to satisfy his wants, in order to maintain his life and reproduce it, so civilized man has to do it, and he must do it in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis.”

For most people, those who qualify as vulgar Marxists, means of production means economic production, that is, things like factories, machines, and natural resources used in production likes iron and coal. However, as is clear from the quote above from Marx, the means of production go way beyond economic production to include things like ideas, religion, and other aspects of culture/society that we consider necessary. For a really good look at what I’m talking about, I suggest reading Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason. Sahlins discusses specially the production of advertising in Marxist terms. Very interesting! Continue reading Means of Production: Capitalism versus Socialism→

In my experience teaching and talking politics and sociology and anthropology, I have learned that most Americans have a very distorted understanding of what socialism/Marxism is. This is probably due to the residual hangover of the McCarthy witchhunts of the 1950s. Sen. Joe McCarthy and later J. Edgar Hoover saw Communists in every closet in America and they swore to ferret them all out, even if there were no Communists.

I want to talk about the role of socialism in the current presidential campaign, but I really don’t want to do a long detailed explanation of what socialism/Marxism is so I’m asking all of you to read the following article. Click here to read.

It took a bit longer than I thought/hoped it would, but the Christian Heresiology site is now back up and running. However, it has a new address: christianheresy.com . Your log-in -should- be the same, but please let me know if you have any issues trying to get in by leaving me a personal message either here or on Facebook.

Due to a weird e-mail screw up, I lost the domain name for christianheresiology.com. It would cost far more than I really want to spend to get it back, so I am going to move the site to WordPress over this weekend, hopefully. I apologize for the inconvenience, but this move was what I intended in the not too distant future anyways. It’s just going to a happen a bit sooner and a bit faster than I had originally planned.